Deborah ASCHER BARNSTONE | PhD, Professor and Associate Head of School Architecture University of Technology Sydney, Australia
deborahascher.barnstone@uts.edu.au Abstract
The eminent German architect Bruno Taut was an innovator in the realm of color in architecture.
Initially trained as a painter who then turned to architectural design, he experimented lifelong with applications of color in every aspect of architectural design. Although he is widely known for the vibrantly colored fantasy drawings he produced soon after the First World War, he is less well known for the brightly colored architecture he produced in Magdeburg or his manifesto on colored building.
The Color of Innovation: Bruno Taut’s Fantasy Drawings and Painted Architecture
For the German architect Bruno Taut, art practice was the way to probe futuristic and fantastic visions, a polemical tool of the first order, and a means through which he could express architectural ideas that were not circumscribed by the constraints of reality, constructional, functional, or otherwise. Art practice was also a way to explore ideas for the use of color that he would later use on the surface of a façade and also in the three-dimensional space of architecture.
Through painterly explorations, Taut discovered ways to use color to transform architecture from familiar to unfamiliar, from conventional to innovative. The methods that Taut developed were the result of a deeply felt design philosophy; they were more than mere surface decoration, they altered the outer and inner qualities of buildings, to achieve what he called, “optische Sinnfreude”
(meaningful optical pleasure). And on the interiors, his use of color created an emotional response in the viewer that Taut believed he could predict and control. (Figure 1)
Taut was first trained as a painter and vacillated at times about which career path he should follow, painting or architecture. In 1904 he wrote he brother Max, “I feel more and more like a painter.”1 He wondered, “How extensive is my talent? I can probably best live according to my nature in the field of art, probably better than in architecture.”2 Taut is likely referring to his quasi-mystical and religious tendencies, which he could better express in the relatively unrestricted realm of art over the functionally, practically, and politically circumscribed profession of
1 Bruno Taut Diary, AdK Berlin, re-printed in Bruno Taut 1880-1938, 33.
2 Ibid.
5 architecture. From the start, Taut had a sophisticated color sense and the ability to work with a complex color palette, a rare gift.
Taut developed his talent for the application of color through a careful study of color theory;
beginning with Goethe’s Farbenlehre of 1810 to more contemporary ideas, in particular those of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and the French painter Robert Delaunay as well as Dutch theorist Theo van Doesburg. (Figure 2) There were several strains to the color debates important to underline here – the tension between form and color, the search for color harmony, and the question whether color was an inherent material property or a perceptual response to material.
Kandinsky proposed that form, color and meaning were inextricable from one another – an idea that Taut embraced. Kandinsky and Delaunay both were interested in the emotional associations and sensations color elicited in viewers and probed this aspect of color in their work. (Figure 3) Delaunay rejected the notion that color was a secondary property of form; he saw color as a formal and spatial element in its own right, ideas that were deeply attractive to Taut. Van Doesburg was the first theorist to associate the primary colors, red, yellow and blue plus black, white, and grey with two-, three-, and four-dimensional space.1 Taut would also adopt this understanding of the primary schema for exteriors and interiors of his buildings.
In his essay “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Taut uses Kandinsky’s paintings as an example of the direction in which architects must go. Kandinsky’s work in 1912-1913 had moved into abstraction; the canvases are full of vibrant color, animated lines and forms, and composed without recognizable objects or conventional spatial relationships. In 1912, Kandinsky had published his famous book On the Spiritual in Art, which was a passionate embrace of color as the driving force in art.
Kandinsky began by articulating the properties of color like warm and cold, light and dark, and complementarity and assigned emotional value to color, although perhaps most importantly for Taut, Kandinsky organized his color world in oppositional values, an approach that Taut would adopt and adapt to his architectural projects.
Taut asserts that like Kandinsky and other contemporary artists, architects must achieve “freedom from perspective and single vantage points…the buildings of great architectural eras were invented without perspective….”2 Taut blames the over concern with perspective for trapping architects in a mode of thinking that paradoxically produces flat, “backdrop” buildings rather than spatial experience. “Architecture,” he writes, “should have rooms whose characteristic phenomena come from the new art…light compositions of Delaunay…Cubic rhythms of the paintings by Franz Marc or the art of Kandinsky. The pillars outside and inside should reflect the constructive sculptures of Archipenko, Campendonk will make the ornament.”3 In other words,
1 John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 242. See also Theo van Doesburg, “Painting and Sculpture: Elementarism” (1927).
2 Bruno Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Der Sturm, No. 196, 174.
3 IBID, 175.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
6 Taut is searching for a way to develop new space and form using color as a constitutive part.
Delaunay’s complex canvases were influenced by Cubist composition along with the color theories of Paul Signac and Eugene Chevreul, and the perceptual ideas of Charles Henry, but moved to pure abstraction and used abstract formal structures and color to create emotional sensation.
From Chevreul, Delaunay learned the importance of optical mixing of colors and how to juxtapose complementary colors to great visual effect. Taut combined Kandinsky’s and Delaunay’s approaches with the primary palette of Theo van Doesburg.
Among the other color controversies was disagreement about how many primaries existed and what the primaries actually were; Taut plays with both the additive and subtractive notions of primary colors: red, blue, green, and red, yellow, blue, with black, white and grey.1 At the Berlin Weissensee development (1926), for example, he painted the facades in alternating bands of primary color from bottom to top: blue, yellow, red, yellow, capped with white.
Taut recognizes that painting has made advances that suggest some paths forward for architectural application of color. And yet, Taut is not yet really sure what this new architecture might look like or how to achieve it. He begins to consolidate his ideas about color in 1919 in “Call to a Colored Architecture.”2 In the 19th century there were vibrantly colored buildings, he asserts, but they were either farm buildings or historic structures in the Hanseatic and harbor cities;
otherwise, the modern industrial city was largely dull grey. Taut declares, “The last years have, through pure technical and scientific emphasis killed meaningful optical pleasure. Grey in grey stone boxes in place of colored and painted houses.”3 He continues, “Everything that is in the world must have some color. All of nature is colored, and even the grey of the dust, soot, even the gloomy melancholy areas always have a certain type of color.”4 And to justify the use of bright color in architecture he asserts, "In place of the dirty grey houses I place again a blue, red, green, yellow, black, white house in undisturbed light coloring.”5
In 1902 Taut had written his brother Max, “The idea which I have already carried around with me for two years still occupies me – the combination of my talents with regard to color with my architectural ability. Spatial composition with color, colored architecture – these are areas in which I shall perhaps say something special.”6 In fact, it is using these two related but different approaches to art and architecture that Taut finds his path forward. From 1917 Taut uses color
1 See Charles A. Riley II, Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1995) for an extensive discussion on the search for primary colors. Subtractive primaries are ones based on paints which, when added together make grey; additive primaries are those based on light, which, when added together make white.
2 Bruno Taut, “Aufruf zum farbigen Bau,” Die Bauwelt, 10 JG, Heft 38, 18 Sept. 1919
3 Bruno Taut, “Aufruf zum farbigen Bau” “Die vergangenen Jahrzehnte haben durch die rein technische und wissenschaftliche Betonung die optischen Sinnesfreuden getötet. Grau in graue Steinkästen traten an die Stelle farbiger und bemalter Häuser.”
4 Ibid, “Alles, was auf der Welt ist, muss irgendeine Farbe haben. Die ganze Natur ist farbig, und selbst das Grau des Staubes, des Rußes, selbst die düsteren melancholischen Gegenden haben immer eine bestimmte Art von Farbe.”
5 Bruno Taut, “Aufruf zum farbigen Bau,” -- “An Stelle des schmutzig-grauen Hauses trete endlich wieder das blaue, rote, grüne, gelbe, schwar- ze, weiße Haus in ungebrochen leuchtender Tönung."
6 Bruno Taut Diary, AdK. Cited in Whyte, 20.
7 in his visionary drawings as an evocative way to explore new architecture and new urban design propositions and to provoke emotional responses in his audience. He then transposes the lessons he learns from color exploration in his visionary drawings and paintings to his façade designs, where he experiments with applying color in abstract patterns as a form of contemporary ornament, and to interiors where he probes the possibilities of color as a way of enhancing space, spatial perception, and the emotional response to space.
Taut’s fascination with bold and contrasting color is evident in the visionary books from the late teens and early 1920s like Der Weltmeister shown here. Taut generally restricts his palette to primary and complementary colors, utilized in a broad range of values. In this page from Alpine Architecture, for instance, he juxtaposes bright red and yellow, adds a smattering of blue and green as accents, against a stark white background. Chevreul and others had demonstrated that the intentional placement of complementary colors next to one another caused a perceptual sense that each was more intense than when viewed alone. Similarly, the concentric circles in this plate work either with complementary color contrast or tonal contrast. But the contrasts are more than optical phenomena, they are also spatial ones that follow Kandinsky’s spatial color theory; blue recedes and yellow and red advance. The receding blue suggests the infinity of outer space in contrast to the forward pushing red of the central sphere.
Taut developed a two-pronged approach to his use of color in architecture. For facades, he strove to create “meaningful optical pleasure” as at the Falkenburg Housing Estate, Magdeburg downtown, and Onkel Tom’s Hutte while on the interiors he chose colors that went beyond optical pleasure to stimulate emotional sensations. Kandinsky articulated the emotional value of specific colors.1 He associated green with bourgeois comfort, for instance, blue with spirituality and peace, and red with energy, warmth and passion. Although Taut never articulated the specific emotional corollaries to his interior palettes, a comparison between Kandinsky’s color characteristics in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which Taut knew well, and Taut’s designs makes it apparent that Taut worked with many of Kandinsky’s ideas for his interior color schemes.
One unit at Taut’s famous Hufeisensiedlung has recently been lovingly and accurately restored to the original color scheme of saturated primary colors. Taut explains, “The house form is a crystallization of the atmospheric conditions. It is supported through color.”2 The house is totally organized around the primary color scheme; each room has a color theme that addresses all six surfaces, walls, floor, and ceiling as well as furnishings to create an emotionally-charged atmosphere by juxtaposing complementary colors in the same space.
(Figure 4)
The choice of green for the living room follows Kandinsky’s association of green with comfort and
1 Gage, 242.
2 “Aufruf zum farbigen Bau,” “Die Hausform ist eine Kristallisation der atmosphärischen Bedingungen. Sie wird unterstützt durch die Farbe.”
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
8 bourgeois luxury. The red floor adds warmth and the white ceiling suggests “endless possibility.”
Blue as the bedroom color is meditative and peaceful, which makes for a good space to rest in.
Yellow for the spare room is “cheeky and exciting” so it is appropriate for its function. And white makes good sense in a kitchen as a symbol of heath and hygiene but also to emphasize this room as the space “pregnant with possibilities” of the culinary variety.1
(Figure 5)
In all of the rooms, Taut carefully selected furnishings that would both fit well into the space and whose color would optically balance the room colors. He places black and white objects in the kitchen to heighten the sense of hygiene. He accents the blue walls in the bedroom with white and black built-in furniture and a red stove. In the spare room, he places red curtains, a red couch, and a blue chair, then colors the ceiling white and the radiator black completing the use of primary colors.
Taut had invented an innovative way to combine contemporary color theories in the service of architectural form and space that was different from any other approach. While his use of color to enliven facades was unique and embodied Taut’s notion of “meaningful optical pleasure” by creating visually attractive patterns on building facades, it was his interior treatments that suggested a truly original way to use color in space as an agent of psychological and emotional charge. His colleague Adolf Rading used color to transform the interior into an abstract space, akin to a theatrical set or a folded painting, in which the traditional markers for spatial boundaries are replaced with colored surfaces and colored abstract shapes. Van Doesburg and the De Stijl group used color to articulate individual planar elements of the space in a way that was unfamiliar and designed to dissolve spatial boundaries. In contrast, Taut does not treat every plane differently but tends to choose a single color for the walls, another for the ceiling, and another for the floor to form an immersive environment. This creates a totally different spatial effect that emphasizes the emotional quality of the space. Rather than giving the sense of stepping into a canvas, or an abstract space, in which color articulates the planes of the enclosure, Taut’s rooms give the sense of entering an emotion-charged zone delineated by the room’s all-encompassing color – the blue room, green room, red room. Once across the threshold, color envelops you giving a strong sensation and optical pleasure.
1 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912).
9 Figure 1: Page from Alpine Architecture that shows how Taut worked with color, in particular primary color, in his artwork.
Figure 2: Goethe’s color wheel from the Farbenlehre of 1810.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
10 Figure 3: Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 27, 1912, from the same year he authored his On the Spiritual in Art. The painting shows his ideas about color and the bold palette he was working with.
11 Figure 4: Bruno Taut’s Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Development) from above.
Figure 5: Bruno Taut interior at the Hufeisensiedlung. The room shows how Taut worked with primary colors along with black and white on the interiors.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
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